US-led international coalition kills Islamic State militants in Anbar

Anbar (IraqiNews.com) The United States-led international coalition launched on Wednesday an airstrike on an Islamic State hideout in Anbar, a military source said.

“The air raid left a number of IS militants dead, and destroyed a large cache of their weapons,” the source told AlSumaria News.

Iraq declared the collapse of Islamic State’s territorial influence in Iraq earlier this month with the recapture of Rawa, a city on Anbar’s western borders with Syria, which was the group’s last bastion in Iraq.

Speaking during a weekly press briefing at the cabinet’s building in Baghdad on Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi pointed that security forces had cleared “14,000 square kilometers” of al-Jazirah, a desert region surrounded by Anbar, Salahuddin and Nineveh provinces, from Islamic State vestiges.

“At a military level, Islamic State in Iraq is over,” Abadi declared. He had said that final victory over IS would be proclaimed after al-Jazirah is totally cleared.

IS declared a self-styled “caliphate” in a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria in 2014. A government campaign, backed by the coalition, launched in 2016 to retake IS-held regions, managing to retake all havens, most notably the city of Mosul, the group’s previously proclaimed capital.